Social media is now parasocial media
Summary
In this anniversary essay for Social Media + Society, danah boyd argues that the platforms scholars have spent two decades calling “social media” no longer warrant that name. Where early-2000s platforms supported reciprocal exchange, identity work, and peer community-building, today’s dominant platforms reward scrolling over posting, algorithmically promoted professional content over friend updates, and one-sided attention to influencers over mutual relationships. boyd proposes the field deprecate “social media” in favor of “parasocial media,” a relabeling she frames as both a descriptive correction and a normative intervention with consequences for how we study governance, inequality, and digital sociality.
Key Contributions
- Introduces “parasocial media” as a successor term to “social media,” reviving Horton & Wohl’s (1956) parasocial interaction concept for the platform era.
- Offers a first-person genealogy of how “social computing,” “social software,” “Web 2.0,” “social network sites,” and finally “social media” were coined and consolidated in the mid-2000s — boyd having been a participant in those debates.
- Links parasocial framing to the political economy of platforms, drawing on Doctorow’s enshittification thesis and the rise of influencer industries.
- Calls for an analytic-vocabulary revision so that scholarly work on governance, inequality, and sociality reflects what platforms have actually become.
Methods
A reflective, historically grounded essay synthesizing two decades of participant-observation in the social media industry with secondary literature from platform studies, influencer studies, parasocial interaction theory, and platform political economy. The argumentation proceeds primarily through conceptual and terminological analysis rather than empirical data collection.
Findings
- Posting has declined while scrolling dominates user activity on major platforms (citing John, 2024).
- Feeds are increasingly populated by professionalized creator and advertiser content rather than friend updates.
- Doctorow’s three-stage “enshittification” trajectory describes how platforms have moved from user-serving to investor-serving, with current platforms occupying the terminal stage.
- Algorithmic incentives have converted “creators” into “influencers” producing assetizable content, while ordinary users face privacy, reputational, and social risks that depress posting.
- Parasocial engagement, though emotionally intense and time-consuming, fails to generate reciprocal social fabric and can coexist with — even amplify — loneliness and toxicity.
- Continuing to call these platforms “social” has biased normative interpretation and obscured the genre shift.
Connections
boyd’s terminological intervention dovetails with Baym2026-tr’s reflections on what the field’s foundational vocabulary has captured and missed, and with Marwick2026-ss and Marwick2026-qd on influencer culture and the asymmetric visibility regimes that parasociality both produces and depends on. Swartz2026-zb likely shares the political-economy register through which boyd reads enshittification and the financialization of platform sociality.
Podcast
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